That evening Sergeant Mackay returned to requisition provisions, and departed again. He was alone, and very much disgusted, having no news of the fugitive. He did not revisit Bonaventure during the next day I remained there, and presumably the man he sought slipped away when the coast was clear. Perhaps the fact that the whirling drifts would obliterate his tracks had deceived the sergeant, and we supposed the contrabandists who dealt in prohibited liquor had smuggled him across the American frontier. The night before I took my leave Beatrice Haldane looked across at her sister, who sat sewing near the stove, and then at me.
"Since you recovered your horse I am not altogether sorry the hunted man got away," she said. "There are, however, two things about the affair which puzzle me—how the candlestick my sister carried when she made the rounds reached the table in the hall where it is never left; and why I should find the candle it contained under the sideboard in the room the intruder entered! Can you suggest any solution, Mr. Ormesby?"
I felt uncomfortable, knowing that Beatrice Haldane was not only clever herself, but the daughter of a very shrewd man, while her eyes were fixed steadily on me. Lucille's head bent lower over her sewing, and, though I would have given much to answer frankly, I felt that she trusted me. So I said, as indifferently as I could: "There might be several, and the correct one very simple. Somebody must have knocked the candlestick over in his hurry and forgotten about it. Have you been studying detective literature latterly?"
Beatrice Haldane said nothing further; but I realized that I had incurred her displeasure, and was not greatly comforted by the grateful glance her sister flashed at me.
CHAPTER IV
THE TIGHTENING OF THE NET
It was a hot morning of early summer when I rode up the low rise to my house at Gaspard's Trail. A few willows straggled behind one side of it, but otherwise it rose unsheltered from the wind-swept plain, which, after a transitory flush of greenness, had grown dusty white again. I had been in the saddle since sunrise, when the dewy freshness had infused cheerfulness and vigor into my blood, but now it was with a feeling of dejection I reined in my horse and sat still, looking about me.
The air was as clear as crystal, so that the birches far off on the western horizon cut sharply against the blue. All around the rest of the circle ran an almost unbroken sweep of white and gray, streaked in one place by the dust of alkali rolling up from a strip of bitter water, which flashed like polished steel. Long plow-furrows stretched across the foreground, but even these had been baked by pitiless sunshine to the same monotony of color, and it was well I had not sown the whole of them, for sparse, sickly blades rose in the wake of the harrows where tall wheat should have been. Behind these stood the square log dwelling and straggling outbuildings of logs and sod, all of a depressing ugliness, while two shapeless yellow mounds, blazing under the sunshine, represented the strawpile granaries. There was no touch of verdure in all the picture, for it had been a dry season, which boded ill for me.
Presently a horse and a rider, whose uniform was whitened by the fibrous dust, swung out of a shallow ravine—or coulée, as we called them—and Trooper Cotton cantered towards me. "Hotter than ever, and I suppose that accounts for your downcast appearance," he said. "I've never seen weather like it. Even the gophers are dead."
"It grows sickening; but you are wrong in one respect," I answered ruefully. "All the gophers in the country have collected around my grain and wells. As they fall in after every hearty meal of wheat, we have been drinking them. You are just in time for breakfast, and I'll be glad of your company. One overlooks a good deal when things are going well, but the sordid monotony of these surroundings palls on one now and then."